The production of a live or live-to-tape video show (such as a network news broadcast, sports broadcast, talk show, or the like) is largely a manual process that involves a team of specialized individuals that work together in a video production environment having a studio and a control room. The video production environment is comprised of many types of video production devices, such as video cameras, microphones, video tape recorders (VTRs), video switching devices, audio mixers, digital video effects devices, teleprompters, and video graphic overlay devices, and the like.
In the conventional production environment, most of the video production devices are manually operated by a production crew of artistic and technical personnel working together under the direction of a director. For example, a standard production crew can include camera operators, a video engineer who controls the camera control units for each camera, a teleprompter operator, a character generator operator, a lighting director who controls the studio lights, a technical director who controls the video switcher, an audio technician who controls an audio mixer, tape operator(s) who control(s) a bank of VTRs, and the like.
One of the first steps of video production for a show entails the capturing of video content by one or more camera operators. Specifically, each camera operator's task is to make the right or best “framing” of the shot (i.e., what is visible in the camera screen and what falls outside of the visible area of the camera) and to ensure that the right part of the framing is spot-on in focus. To judge both, the camera operator will typically use a so-called “viewfinder”, which is usually a small monitor of the camera that shows the image to the camera operator as it is seen through the lens of the camera and viewed by the director. Using this relatively small display, the camera operator must judge the framing and the focus of the captured scene for the live or live-to-tape video shows.
Importantly, the viewfinder must provide a resolution that enables the camera operator to determine which objects (e.g., a person's face) are in focus for the captured frame. As such, current leaders in the industry have continually been developing viewfinder solutions that provide an image resolution that matches or exceeds the production format for the show. However, as video display technologies continue to develop to provide with the move to UHD (“ultra-high-definition”), 4 k and other initiatives, the physical limits are met of what the human eye of the camera operator can judge on a screen of this size. In other words, even if a camera viewfinder is developed with image resolution accordingly to these production formats, the camera operator will not be able to determine what objects are actually in focus for the captured video frames as the resolution surpasses the limits of the human eye on such small screens.
Accordingly, a solution is needed that enables a camera operator to frame shots for video production while also ensuring that the preferred object within the frame is spot-on in focus.